How Tilkee CEO Sylvain Tillon grew Tilkee to $5M revenue and 1.6K customers in 2024.

this is the top where I interview entrepreneurs to our number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base you'll learn how much revenue they're making what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have i'm now at twenty thousand dollars per top five in six million his happens on global domination we just broke a hundred thousand units so mark and i'm your host nathan lapka okay top tribe this week's winner of the 100 bucks that i get away every monday is kim dust she's in the entertainment industry and is currently working a full-time day job and doing her side hustle on the side m congrats for years a chance to win 100 bucks every monday simply subscribe to the podcast on itunes now and then text the word nathan the three three four four four two officially enter again text the word nathan two three three four four four after you subscribe guys if you want an easy tool to use to book your meetings back to back to match your calls to make sure people actually show from a schedule you want to use a cutie scheduling it's what i use from my podcast interviews and nathan ladka calm toward /schedule i'll tell you more about how i use it later on in the episode nathan lack to hear this episode 5 33 coming up tomorrow morning you'll learn from darien Shirazi he's a CEO of radius he's 29 years old they just raised a hundred million dollars and they're helping expand b2b sales pipelines top jaw good morning and nathan ladki here and our guest today is tim assam way he is the CTO at a company called till key which is this a solution software for business proposals follow-up in sales process tracking it's a super hot space before that he was involved with 0 x fo Z technologies as the CEO is also manager of General Services at another company and also project manager at travel do all right Tim Kate are you guys ready to take us to the top yes alright very good and Kate you are just real quick tell us how to tell us so your role at till king and we'll jump in I'm business about that i'm actually i'm currently developing the european market along with my colleagues focusing mainly on the UK because I'm English as you can probably tell very good so Tim give us an overview of kind of wet till he does specifically and then how you guys generate revenue with your business model ok I'm so it's the beach is very simple and as a as a sales man and I used to be assessment not very good very good one I'm engineer so it was a real challenge from into every cell and and when I used to send my business proposal basically it was PDF file and put in a male and when I push the send button of my mail the contact with my prospectus it last so I used to do a couple of randoms for last but it was never a good time to my post pay and nobody called me back so that's why we created with silver my co-founder well that's why we created and teak is a very simple software else asks that you can use to to analyze analyze the the reading behavior of your prospect and using TG you are unable to to follow on the right prospect at the right time with the right message and is this measure hello yo is it specifically for documents kind of PDFs it's any kind of any kind of documents PDF Word PowerPoint video crazy but at one stage yeah you need to send its indicate that you need to send the PDF in a min male great okay so give us some more history on business what year did you launch it in so it was fine what year did you launch the business end we began in his three years and half ago at the very beginning it was a side project with with Silva we was add our own companies and it was making pedagogy tools and I was building websites basically and silver figured out that they should be the great idea to actually pull ups on the business proposals I mean using this kind of tools and I jumped in India the adventure and we created till key then and after a couple of winning a lot of challenges French and international we are them some business some trolls and thumbs and then came to us and we Tim real quick let me just back up before I get too far down the story so you launched it kind of mid-2012 which was about you said three and a half years ago do you remember what your first year revenue was it's always it usually an embarrassing number oh yeah nothing I would say 20 thousand ok twenty thousand and then take us forward real quick but then we'll go kind of back to the story so give us a sense of size now how many customers are you serving ok we serve around eight hundred customers from status to lunch by size companies like a ranch ethical and it's really a fortune 500 European companies okay and and I see your pricing plans kind of go from solo at 19 / month up to up to about 1,500 that's a big big range on average if you just take a weighted average across your entire customer base what's the average customer paying you vermont huh it's quite difficult because for i will say small customer that have less than the 10 users the average is 500 per year but we have a very big customers which have more than 200 500 sees and that can be 50,000 and and more and I've customers with to reach 5,000 okay so if we I mean I mean maybe the better question is wanting to just kind of scale us up so you launched in mid-2012 what was your monthly recurring revenue at the end of 2015 in December antennas last year it was pink range where a twenty20 MMA and we are one of the 100 now oh great so you're doing so again 20,000 n is at USD Tim yes ok perfect thanks we're going to conversion in your head I know that's probably what you were doing there and you're appreciate it so twenty twenty thousand united states dollars at the end of a december up kind of 2015 which would have been about a two hundred forty thousand dollar ARR rate there now almost a year later up to well they're growing really fast to almost five acts to your over a year now doing about a hundred thousand bucks in monthly recurring revenue and Tim what would you credit that growth to is it seed expansion enterprise customers what is it ok kate is showing it Kate Kate Kate wants a raise Kate what's where's the growth coming from okay honestly we have we had to educate the market in France specially so you took us a long time we we made also some pythons called a get em customers so before that we used to sell to a very small companies and we have into an occupied size or much bigger company and also we are yeah we will catch it a lot of very talented what we call tinker's and they address a lot to convince our lease and doing this here so did I get this right Tim you kind of pivoted with the product and the user base they use race with small kind of businesses and now you're much more enterprise and you also pivoted the product to serve the enterprise better as well as that accurate absolutely and have you raised capital of you as you've done this or you bootstraps yes we whisk until two years ago we ways the 1 million women Anna have the rocks and he said that was two years ago yes so that means right now your eat raising more capital or urine acquisition talks which one is it okay we are just began even last month in graduations thank you and we are thinking about raising more money next year well you're in the right spot to do it because you don't need it right exactly that's good what it's as a CEO when you think about how much money you like to raise you said you're doing about a hundred grand in monthly recurring revenue how do you think about how much you would raise if you did raise um unless I mean we we won't go for typical series a well we don't want that because we want to keep the control of the company and for that we will we will raise much more natural than two million okay got it so and when you say control the company you mean more than fifty percent amongst all the co-founders yes and confront us and no please so do you have any kind of an option will do all employees have some amount of equity yes so very good i love that I you know talk to CEOs and they're typically one way or the other they either don't give employees any options outside of the founders or they have an option pool and they give some amount of shares even if it's very little to every employee so they're incentivized yeah i think these presents between we have some place actually both Sean shares oh great five percent of the company's no to some of the employees and we also have some options that we are giving to some of the injuries got it got it well so is it fair to say if you're wanting to make sure you guys keep at least fifty percent of the company and you wouldn't raise more than two million that you'd value it sounds your valiant somewhere around like what three million post-money or pre money but that's that I do you think about or the real question is how do you think about valuation um the typical variation in your world the nice x yeah yeah okay um so when we think will be more than 1 million yeah and end of next year so well you're already I didn't you say you're already out of 100 thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue yes just this this last month so we have to show the progress for the next month thankies beginning of next year okay so what is your turn look like what's your gross monthly customer churn like or turn yes um not so much actually we we say that the chance I will we keep 8080 something personal for Christmas ok so maybe fifteen percent it may be something around there churn up per year so about maybe maybe a maximum of two percent gross turn per month something like that yeah yeah okay and I imagine you've probably seen much different patterns in your enterprise users versus your small business yeah absolutely because felan surprise we have usually have we used contracts fine stance so it's yeah and you know how r n kate maybe this is a good question for you i'm how are you guys kind of finding these enterprise deals as a start with one employee and then you guys have a dashboard and you say ooh uber started using us let me go go through call out one employee on a demo and get them to add their their teammates is that how it works yeah that's one waiting of course if we see some one thing that's really important to us and a lot of companies is actually keeping keeping track of our customers and keep making sure that happy so if we do single at someone that signs up from company of course we actually bring them I think within two minutes there's our no that's them and and then we'll of course given the demo and see if anybody asked once the sciences in their company otherwise it's actually quite clever because we were able to use till key in orders for gas okie out there and known yeah so I've actually if I send you some information until I actually know if you've read it or not and if your particular interested we actually have an algorithm calculated score within every email alert that you will receive telling you that someone's mental documents so this actually allows you to kind of protect your sales as well this is the kind of the kind of way we go about it linkedin is also cover one I think everyone likes to use when I doing this fire thing and product wise are you guys more like I noticed on your pricing page you have East signatures listed but it leaves this whole interviews where you've talked about kind of document tracking is e-signatures something new that you guys are doing because it's a whole nother space you know it's like right signature docusign it's a whole nother competitive market kannada that we are not doing a signature on our service than something we are oh yeah we integrate another solution that's what you want and this French style of call you sign you sign interesting you have to understand that the mind is very different between the US and Europe ok by the e-signature and France on you are charged speaking I signature eyes are paying we will pay from one to two euros per signature because yes it's much more technical and complicated than the required the requirement and you guys live in the u.s. so that's why I'm using am using and you guys going back to unit economics um do you guys have a good idea of what the lifetime value of a customer as Y and if so what is it a means to to show to have a good idea they on these videos because to be honest we made our last pilot one year ago so it stands to early and what is the let me ask it may be differently typically folks I'm an LTV take a crazy or they like to stick to but if you guys just look at customer acquisition cost what are you spending to acquire new customer same thing I've lot of difficulties to actually make it a very good sugar because I can say that we spend we say 200,000 a year under addition okay okay that before and there's that started a job does that include salaries or that just paid marketing spend on google and facebook um mixed okay a big oh yeah okay we don't spend money on advertising today because nobody in Europe who actually searching google google management tool okay today it's the killing the US but not in New York so but for drilling accounts we for instance right now we have a video advertising in the French one of the major French radio and we can clicking the return on investment almost every day but it's quite it's okay right I don't know but I don't like we have the conversion right now that's okay well tell me more i want to get a better sense here it sounds like you guys are using folks like Kate it's kind of an inside sales team so maybe you're fully weighted kak would obviously include their salaries and maybe flying key to big customers things like that what's your current team size and of the Ku total team size how many are doing sales okay we aren't winning total and I have there are 15 15 saves Wow ok so that's a big percentage right yes yeah that's like what is that 67 75 percent of your team our salespeople yeah okay and one of the rest engineers yes okay that's great are you an engineer it's what text occur guys built on I'm curious tell you what text a car you guys built on um the this tank is Ian ways for the API angular for the front and we have also love in the integration for Salesforce instance whispers calm sugarcrm search PHP exit bugs got it what and then Kate are you internally what tools are you guys using to manage your pipeline it sounds you use sugar I'm currently we're choosing pipe drive one of the big forces of silky today's actually integrate ssible into the majority of tools so i drive is a big one for us not till he's pretty good on its own actually that's really good and guys if you want to learn more about pipe drive i had Timo on the CEO back in episode 4 83 he talked about how they passed 10 million bucks an annual recurring revenue and passed the 30,000 customer mark that's at Nathan lakha com /the top 483 now Kate you threw in there that you guys are pretty good at pipeline management are you guys have a CRM component to have let's say a CRM component no no enjoyment okay what did you mean then when he said that you guys are pretty good at it integration well no I said do you guys use a CRM and you said that you use pipe drive but then you add on you said but we're pretty good at it what did you mean by that I think that what cage when I say we want to say that we honor to share him and we are fully integrated within the serums like my gosh oh I see I see got it thanks for clarifying that very good well Guys where's the best place for folks to connect you online if they want to follow you guys as you continue building till key Oh it's your Twitter yeah on Twitter mmm tokiya with the BB or not just I'm wasting time until key or you can go into Tokyo com I don't have any questions you can always email us take the lead on them [Music] all right guys I talked about this earlier but I schedule like so many meetings it would blow your mind I mean all my podcast interviews right hundreds of munch Mars I talk to monthly I schedule any know what I do it so officially I get them all to agree to my calendar so all the calls are back to back to back that means I'm not switching in between tasks all day long I get them to bash so that can be very efficient it's so critical and I use a tool called acuity scheduling to do this at Nathan acha kaam /schedule it eliminates back and forth between me and people I'm trying to meet with it makes it very simple and most importantly they help me keep my no-show rate very low because they send out reminders helps you look very professional so go to natal nike.com /schedule to sign up and you get a great deal you know you guys know this I hit people hard I make great deals and gather the CEO has given us a great deal if you sign up like normal people okay on their website you only get a 14-day free trial to use my link name I kadam board flash scheduled to get 45 days free okay it's the best it's free go to Nathan like a calm for class schedule right now to sign up and I'll see you there all right top tribe we will link that in the show notes at Nathan live com forward slash the top 5 33 again forward slash the top 5 33 all right Kate Tim we're gonna wrap up with our famous five these are really quick one word answers you guys ready yeah number one what's your favorite business book one of my ashes thank you it's not very loud if I sit on co and it's called the last one is the one with the teeth you want to know if you want to fail in your business that's what's what's the book title oh do you know I mostly in friend oh okay who's the author did auntie on stealing stuff see i double-l RN okay awesome i'll look that book uplink to the show notes number two is there a CEO you're following or studying right now um yes the one of the beloved one I didn't she very famous French entrepreneur and anyone risk what's what's what's you the CEO of not Eli must the other one willow is he a philosopher and companies but specialize in the public's got a very good number three is their favorite online tool you have like a cutie scheduling [Music] go go it'd be a little more specific Tim [Laughter] take know which is there anything okays APR very good number for yes or no g-get eight hours of sleep every night yes and Tim to you Tim I didn t everyone no no Sam what's your situation rate are you married single be of kids I I'm similar to the night of kid who is the six very good and how are you 37 okay so last would you say Kate and the gang owes him last question take us back 17 years what do you wish your 20 year old self new uh sorry I didn't catch it what do you wish your 20 year old self deal okay what I learned this past years is focus on personal development like meditation and I think you had ten time I when I was 20 I I wouldn't wish I would have known how to meditate it will be letting me Gretchen mommy what's up tried there you have it from Tim he would have loved to focus on personal development earlier on things like meditation they're serving over 800 customers at till key helping with document management and tracking they raised 1.5 million dollars they're doing about a hundred grand right now in monthly recurring revenue that's December 2016 with less than 2% gross monthly customer turn it's too early to tell kak and LTV in terms of months and dollars but they are really helping a lot of enterprise customers with document document management with their team of 20 potentially raising early next year Tim okay thank you for taking us to the top if you enjoyed Kate today go back and listen to steve from yesterday steve raised a million bucks they just past seventy thousand bucks a month or corn revenue to record sales calls and coach sales executives okay top tribe I'll see you bright and early tomorrow morning and don't forget before you listen to any other episodes subscribe on iTunes right now for your chance to win a hundred bucks every Monday